syPhone 09: Windows Mobile Home Screen for iPhone?

syPhone 09 [rating: 4/5]

Give yourself a handy launch pad with SyPhone!

My initial reaction to this application was “omg someone’s tried to clone Windows Mobile home screen for iPhone” but thankfully syPhone feels a lot better to use despite crashing out a few times. At the top of the screen you have 4 tabs, Email which lets you write a quick email within the application and ToDo which is a simple to do list, both support landscape keyboard however the latter not so well with the text entry box not filling the available screen space.

The next tab is RSS which is a simple RSS reader however it only lets you read what is in the feed itself, there is no pass through to Safari for reading the whole article if the publisher only decides to put a snippet in the RSS feed. The last tab is Find which brings up a list of all the names and phone numbers in your address book and lets you filter it down by name or number by simply using the keyboard or switching to the keypad towards the bottom of the screen are a series of quick call buttons which you can assign to individual numbers from your address book, the button is then replaced by the picture in the contact page, there are 12 of these available with 4 being visible at any one time and you drag left to right to scroll through them.

Other functions include, the current date, current time (mine for some reason is stuck at midday) with location and the current weather conditions with temperature. Tapping these items brings up further functionality, so tapping the date will bring up a month to view calendar and tapping either the time or weather will bring up 4 configurable locations thankfully the background pattern and colour is customisable by turning the device into landscape mode and tapping the a colour and then the pattern of your choice out of a selection of 10 colours and 4 patterns easily matching any iPhone case you care to adorn it with however accessing this function does clash a bit after say writing emails or notes in landscape mode.

As this application launches pretty fast it could be used quite a bit despite not being able to integrate fully into the iPhone software, as you could simply sleep the device while in the app and return to it quickly when going into your phone again.

My gripes with this application is that it feels cramped, partly due to the fact that most of the interactive elements are crammed into the top half of the screen with the static bottom half rarely leaving the screen. I also find this application a good bit unstable having it crashed on me at least 3 times during testing, and for some reason the clock in the middle reports my location but time stuck at midday. Initially I was at a loss as how you remove or edit items like quick call icons, weather and world clock entries all appeared permanent with no obvious way of removing them but actually if you swipe upwards over an item it will come up with a question “are you sure you want to remove this?”